I just heard an ad on Pandora for whipped-cream-flavored vodka. What?

Vicki didn't do a lot of talking, which was the good part. She'd gotten quieter and quieter as they approached the house, and once they were inside she simply plowed through the crowd of dancers, something that took Jeremy a little by surprise. Vicki had adored dancing, once. He'd simply assumed it would be on her list of things to do now that she had the chance too, especially if she had seduction on her mind. She might, after all, be in his uncoordinated body, but he was certain that that, of all things, wouldn't get in her way.

Though, come to think, of it, he didn't know if he would be bad at dancing. The odds were certainly high, but it wasn't like he'd ever tried it before. He hadn't tried a lot of things—or, a lot of things that involved other people—and so no one that they passed knew him well enough to recognize him as the outsider that he was.

Instead Vicki sailed them straight up the stares with an air of such focus and determination that Jeremy experienced for the first time the little inner thrill of watching people move out of his way. He didn't let Vicki pick up on it, though. And he didn't give in to the urge to ask her what on earth they were doing, as she strode up the stairs and settled on a coach placed at the shadowy end of a corridor that was about as far from the rest of the party as it was possible to be.

And then they sat there.

"Vicki," he thought, after a reasonable time had passed. "What on earth are we doing?"

"Hush," she said out loud, and then thought. "I'm trying to listen."

"For what?"

"For somebody to come by who, I don't know, isn't you? Why exactly would I tell you that I'm listening, Jeremy, if I wanted you to talk? I wouldn't. So I don't."

Jeremy glowered at the nearest shadowy wall. "Excuse me. I just thought you might be half as bored as I am."

"Jeremy, it's been about a minute."

"And I'm bored." He wasn't, actually. He was hyped up and twitchy, and wanted this to be over, because yes, he'd agreed to let her do this to him, but that didn't mean he liked it. Jeremy didn't like waiting for things, and especially not the bad ones. That was why he took drugs, goddamn it.

Had.

Hell.

One good thing about Vicki; she couldn't keep quiet once you got her started. "Since when are you the one with the micropatience?" she asked him, tapping her fingers on the rough cord surface of the couch. She kept his eyes fixed on the other end of the hall, where the stairs were, and he thought that she was watching for something, but it was dark enough he had trouble imagining what she expected to see. He wasn't certain, either, how much she actually needed to use his eyes to see.

"'Micropatience?'"

"That's what you call it."

"When it's you, yeah, doing that stupid thing you do wh—"

"Hush!"

"Stop saying 'hush' out loud!"

"Stop...thinking at me for a minute!"

Jeremy, generously, waited almost thirty seconds before he asked, "What is it?"

He could feel Vicki counting, slowly, to ten.

"Do you have any idea," she asked him, "how much you sound like a ten year-old girl right now?"

"I do not!"

"Yes you do. Like one of those girls in those vampire movies that you love—"

"Helen Chandler is not ten years old!"

"Fuck, Jeremy, be quiet!"

"Sorry."

"Good. Wat, what?"

And Jeremy decided then and there that, whatever Vicki said, he deserved a goddamn award for not screaming like a girl, which might make up at least a little bit for all the credit that he lost for not noticing that someone had almost fallen on top of him.

"It's fine," he said, when he had pulled himself together again. "Um."

Looking up into Tyler Lockwood's face, as familiar and alien as the surface of that damn moon, he searched for anything at all to say, and came up with Vicki.

He let her take over for the time being.

…

The worst thing, Jeremy decided, was that he and Vicki still had horribly similar senses of humor.

He could feel every time she made him laugh, but he could feel, too, each time that the action was completely unconscious on her part. During those moments, when no actual order was twitching through his limbs, it was hard to remember that the laughter still wasn't coming from him, because he wanted to laugh, too.

He had thought that he would hate when she made him do things he didn't want to; he hadn't thought how it would feel if he did. It was…well, it was creepy. It made it hard to remember that it wasn't really him laughing, and Jeremy might have been willing to put up with being a puppet, but that depended entirely on his remaining aware of the situation. If he forgot he wasn't in control, it would only hurt him more when Vicki forced him to remember.

A good part of the problem, too, he thought, rested with Tyler. He was funny—in his big, dumb, thoughtlessly vindictive way. Jeremy could remember that he had thought exactly the same thing at the age of seven, when Elena, acting under the influences that possessed eight year-old girls from time to time and which Jeremy was sure came from a signaling tower on Jupiter, had invited all of Mystic Elementary's soccer team to her birthday party. Tyler had stolen Jeremy's stuffed donkey, Wallace, and instead of simply destroying her, as all the other boys had idly urged him to, spent the next half an hour puppetting the toy around the room, speaking for her in a perfect, braying voice and keeping her always just out of Jeremy's reach. Even at the time, Jeremy recalled, as he'd rubbed away his tears he had thought Tyler/Wallace's comments were hilarious.

Come to think of it, he'd learned most of the curse words that he now knew from that party. And later used most of them on himself, in one way or another.

Because what did that say about him, that he not only let people bully him, but actually saw the good parts of it? He wasn't just incapable of standing up for himself, he was the kind of person who sat down to let other people take his place. At the age of seven Jeremy hadn't known the word apologist, but he'd figured out a lot about the meaning of it that day.

It pissed Jeremy off to face the fact that neither of them had really changed. Tyler was still hopelessly self-confident, and had a memory that Jeremy would accuse of having more holes than his great-grandmother's had, if he weren't sure that things and people like him simply didn't count. They didn't fit in Tyler's mind well enough for storage to be an issue. Even at Elena's party, Tyler hadn't bothered to notice Jeremy's name.

And he still had that way of saying things that were just so goddamn perfect, so honest and so different from the lies that Jeremy expected, that Jeremy had trouble remembering that honesty itself wasn't a virtue, because you didn't have to lie to wound. It was just what most people chose to do.

Jeremy kept that awareness of his own weakness at the fore of his mind, partly to fortify himself and partly to prevent himself from thinking any further into his own faults where Vicki could pick up on them.

But Vicki—oh, Vicki was busy laughing, and not a shred of guilt for it, because after all, it wasn't Vicki's insignificance that Tyler was acknowledging. And maybe it was Vicki who Tyler was undervaluing by the assumption that he could, as he currently was, use her as a pillow and willing, silent companion on his drunken rambles—but then, Vicki showed absolutely no signs of caring.

Vicki was a skank.

And Tyler loved it, Jeremy could tell. Despite his protestations of sobriety—and Jeremy would admit he was far more intelligible than was to be expected, given the number of beers he'd probably consumed by now—he didn't seem able or willing to stand again, and in fact had drifted sideways, until he wasn't so much sitting next to Jeremy as he was draped across his shoulder.

And he wouldn't stop talking.

'Intelligible' was perhaps a questionable word. 'Articulate' might well be better, because while Jeremy could understand all of the words, the greater meaning to them completely passed him by. It wasn't just the story-something about squirrels, he was pretty sure: he had a feeling, too, that what was being said, and even this whole moment, had a significance that he had no way of understanding. Jeremy hated that. It reminded him of listening to someone else in the middle of their trip, when the whole universe made sense to them and he knew it did but couldn't possibly connect. He'd quit because he wanted to stop feeling that way, and now here he was again. It occurred to him to wonder, briefly, if Tyler was on anything but attitude and beer right now, but he dismissed it fairly quickly. The idea just didn't fit with anything he knew about the guy, which admittedly wasn't much.

Besides that he was heavy, when he chose to drape himself on somebody, and disgustingly popular, and warm.

It took him by complete surprise when breath that only smelled a little bit like beer tickled against his ear. "I'm sorry I'm boring you," Tyler said, remarkably matter-of-fact for someone who had his head pretty much on Jeremy's shoulder.

Vicki hurried to reassure him that he wasn't, and Jeremy wanted to argue with her because Tyler was right—he wasn't making much sense, and Jeremy wasn't listening. That didn't mean he wanted Tyler to stop talking, or to go; it was just a fact, and Jeremy thought that maybe Tyler got that, but he didn't have a chance to find out. Maybe that was a good thing: he wasn't not the one who was supposed to interact with Tyler, after all, and that'd be easier if he didn't learn that Tyler agreed with him about anything that mattered.

But Tyler didn't pay much account to Vicki, just looked at them for a moment, and shook his head. "Nah," he said. "I am." And Jeremy wondered whether he meant he was boring him, or if he meant he was sorry. Maybe it was just a statement of the facts of the universe.

Later he'd wish to the depths of his probably nonexistent soul that he had been paying better attention. Vicki was there, after all, undead proof that there was something more than he'd thought to the world, so maybe he did have a soul, and there was a god, and he'd listen to Jeremy's prayers and take him back to the moment when Vicki wasn't there, when she sat silenced for a heartbeat by the desperate weight of a love that had spent to many years unspoken, and so Jeremy spoke instead. He didn't realize he had asked his question until he heard Tyler laugh.

"Yeah," he said, smiling in a way that reminded Jeremy exactly why people liked Tyler and no one liked him, because they were both sort of jerks but Jeremy definitely couldn't smile like that. "Yeah, I guess that I am. Oh, fuck. That doesn't mean anything, does it?"

"Nah," Jeremy told him. "It doesn't, really."

Tyler leaned back into the couch, still smiling as he searched the ceiling for an answer. "Guess I meant the first one," he said. "But really I meant all three. Right?"

"Right," said Jeremy, and when Tyler looked down at him again, the shift knocked his knee into Jeremy's, and Jeremy kneed him back. They both laughed about it, and in his head Jeremy tried to wrap the sound of that laugh up in patterned paper and give Vicki the present she deserved.

It didn't nearly cover the debt he owed her, but for the moment, it was the best that he could do.

The feeling of pleasure that he discovered in making someone who ought to dislike him laugh that way—that part he kept for himself, because if the best he could were good enough he wouldn't be a drug addict, and neither Vicki nor his sisters would be dead.